Helsinki’s skull collection contains the remains of around 1,300 people, gathered between 1839 and 1935, and is now raising questions about what universities should do with human remains acquired during the era of racial science. A multidisciplinary committee established in summer 2026 is considering the collection’s future, according to an investigation published by Finnish broadcaster Yle on 23 October.
More than 1,000 of the skulls came from the territory of present-day Finland. The others include remains from elsewhere in Europe and from Indigenous peoples in Australia and South America. The collection is held at a storage centre in Vantaa, outside Helsinki, and researchers can examine it with special permission. No decision to return further remains has been announced.
How Helsinki’s skull collection became part of an international trade
Behind the inventory numbers are people whose remains entered an anatomical network that stretched across borders. Among the oldest skulls are those of prisoners who died at the Sveaborg penal institution, on the island fortress now known as Suomenlinna. Their bodies were provided for medical research.
In 1884, anatomy professor Konrad Hällstén sent 48 skulls from Helsinki to Budapest and received roughly 40 in exchange. At the time, the Helsinki collection was among the largest of its kind in Europe. Such transactions reflected a scientific culture in which human remains could be treated as interchangeable research material.
Many skulls were collected for craniology, which sought to classify supposed human races and infer differences, including intelligence, from measurements of the skull. Those racial theories are now recognised as racist and scientifically discredited. The history of the collection therefore concerns not only where the remains came from, but also why they were obtained.
Who should begin the process of returning the remains?
The university’s collection previously included Sámi skulls, which were returned to Sámi communities in 1995 and 2001. But it still contains the remains of Indigenous people from Australia and South America.
According to Yle, no state or Indigenous community has submitted a formal request for the return of remains from the current collection. Such requests usually initiate repatriation procedures, leaving an important question unresolved: should the institution holding the remains take the first step?
Laura Arppe, a curator at the Finnish Museum of Natural History who took responsibility for the collection in 2025, told Yle that she hopes the university can become more proactive in facilitating returns to Indigenous communities. That is her expressed hope, not an announced university decision. Arppe expects the multidisciplinary committee to pay particular attention to the Indigenous remains, although its conclusions have not been made public.
A Swedish return shows why provenance matters
A separate case in neighbouring Sweden illustrates both the possibility of restitution and the difficulty of establishing where remains belong. In August 2024, Stockholm’s Karolinska Institutet returned 82 skulls to Finland after a Swedish government decision. Some had been taken from Finnish burial sites in the nineteenth century, while others had been sent from Helsinki’s anatomical collections.
On 20 October 2026, the University of Turku reported new findings showing that some of those 82 individuals did not originate in Finland. Researchers have not yet disclosed their more precise origins. The discovery demonstrates how historical exchanges and incomplete records can complicate decisions even after remains have crossed a border in a formal return.
Helsinki’s collection also has continuing scientific value. Material uncovered in the Bulevardi area during twentieth-century construction work has been used in more recent research on the presence and spread of plague bacteria. The committee must therefore weigh potential research benefits and the museum’s duty to preserve historical evidence against the ethical burden of keeping human remains obtained under very different standards.
Arppe described the collection to Yle as both valuable and a monument to a form of misuse. For now, the new committee has a mandate to consider its future, but the question of who should initiate any further returns remains unanswered.
